Yeah, that time is even moreso now because cars are far more complex and expensive as fuck now. Just the HVAC system alone on a modern luxury car probably has more components than the entirety of my old 1972 MG. You can bet your ass my friends find it very valuable when I can quickly fix stuff on their cars a dealership wanted to charge $1200 for.

At least on my TV, I’ve had firmware updates enable things like variable refresh rate, enable 4K/120Hz, improve the dynamic contrast performance, and fix a couple of weird bugs it had shipped with.

The good news with iRobot is that they actually have pretty solid cybersecurity. They also do a pretty great job of supporting parts for old robots and make them quite easy to repair. For a typical consumer product, I feel like they’re far better than most companies in terms of how shitty they could be vs how shitty they actually are.

Instant Pot was a product so good that customers rarely needed to buy another one. The company went bankrupt.

Bull-fucking-shit. That’s just not how any of this works.

There are plenty of companies that make appliances that last a long fucking time, and don’t have to rely on fucking DLC micro transaction AI bullshit. The reason Instant Pot went bankrupt is the same reason a ton of popular companies have recently had issues: They got bought by private equity (who also owned Pyrex and fucked them over), saddled with a shitton of bad debt, squeezed of every bit of brand value they had, and then left to fall apart as the PE firm made off with millions.

The fact that the writer correlated “quality, durable good” with “unsuccessful business and bankruptcy” is absolutely one of the worst takes, and really shows just how pervasive this disgusting idea of “must be disposable to be profitable” really is.